What Does It Mean to “Decolonize” Your Gender?

What Does It Mean to “Decolonize” Your Gender?

If you’ve spent time on Native TikTok or in anti-racist organizing spaces, you may have heard about “decolonizing your gender.” While the connection between gender and decolonization may not be immediately clear, the concepts are actually deeply intertwined.

In simple terms, decolonizing your gender means undoing the colonial gender binary of what it means to be a “man” and a “woman,” and looking critically at how colonization has impacted what we know as gender today.
----------------------------------------------
In order to decolonize gender, it’s crucial to understand the history of how gender was colonized in the first place. Prior to European colonization of what we now know as the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, gender variant people existed all over the world. Indigenous nations across Turtle Island (North America) and Abya Yala (South America) often revered the gender variant people in their communities, as they held sacred titles and performed important duties such as healing and governing. When European colonizers took the land, they brought their own narrow ideas of gender to the continent and attempted to eradicate Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer people.

LINK